Looking at those original, pre-tournament predictions, only 37.6% of the group stage matches ended the way Goldman Sachs’s original model forecast. That is, it correctly calculated one of three possible outcomes—win, lose or draw—just over a third of the time, hardly better than predicting it at random. From those calculated correctly, they managed to foresee the scoreline 17% of the time, meaning three occasions: Argentina-Bosnia, South Korea-Russia and Algeria-Russia.

When the bank updated its predictions at the end of the group stages, it got the result of the match—win, lose or draw—right 60% of the time. But it failed to correctly guess the results of both semi-finals at that stage, and hence ended up predicting the wrong teams for the final.

It seems fair to point out a couple of key things here. First, a key clause in those predictions:

“If a key player who was responsible for a team’s recent successes is injured, this will have no bearing on our predictions.” Brazil’s celebrated striker, Neymar, went out before the semi-final with a back injury. Maybe more important was Thiago Silva’s absence from the match because of an untimely yellow card during the quarter-finals. Goldman could argue that it was the lack of Brazil’s best defender that caused its crushing 7-1 defeat.